Another concern over a U.S.-domiciled global LEI organization may be related to American regulators who gained access to SWIFT message traffic in the anti-terrorism investigations and succeeded, with European Union action, in getting SWIFT to cut Iranian banks from using the interbank network.

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Traditionally a corporation could put just one payment in a message, and it had to pay SWIFT for each message.

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Now the company can place up to 40 payments in a single message and it can deliver that message to a domestic point on the SWIFT network and have it sent on anywhere in the world at the domestic rate, which is a half to a third of the international charge.

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The other alternative to expensive and duplicative co-existence of two standards for corporate actions would be for SWIFT to set a deadline to phase out the older message type, said Lind.

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Malene McMahon, senior business manager at SWIFT, said a large number of SWIFT participants are achieving high STP rates with the old message standard and are not ready to move away from it yet.

FORBES: Is SWIFT Lagging On Corporate Actions Or Serving Its Global Membership?

In addition to security and speed, SWIFT offers a standard interface to reach pretty much any bank in the world with a standard message format to provide completely automated processing of payments, straight-through processing (STP) in industry terminology.

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